Microsoft Plugs FPGAs in Datacenter

CUPERTINO, Calif. – Next year, Microsoft will start plugging Altera FPGA cards into new servers it deploys to run its Bing search service. Someday it might make such cards a standard part of the million servers in its datacenters.

That's the goal for Andrew Putnam, part of a Microsoft Research that led to the current use of FPGAs for Bing. It talks at the annual Hot Chips event here Pullman and an engineer from China's search giant Baidu described their parallel efforts.